Gillian Tan

BODIES is a site-specific immersive environment by Ray Young, commissioned by Unlimited and directed by Gail Babb — made for and performed in public leisure centres. An immersive water, light, and soundscape that investigates our embodied relationship to water: swimming pools, changing rooms, exercise halls — the ordinary institutions where we negotiate our bodies in public. Alicia Jane Turner’s score runs through it; Nandi Bhebe’s movement work keeps everything physical and grounded.

The video design had to function in spaces not built for performance — no standard infrastructure, no fixed surfaces. That constraint is the point. The work is about bodies in institutional space, and the design responds to that: working alongside Nao Nagai’s lighting within the existing architecture rather than against it. Touring across four very different venues — Leytonstone, Cambridge, Leeds, Edinburgh — each iteration had to be rebuilt from scratch, reading the space anew each time.